1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the development of e-learning tutorials and multimedia presentations and more particularly to a system for automatically generating e-learning tutorials and multimedia presentations, containing matching images from the system's image library, from a document or documents created by a word processor.
2. Background of the Prior Art
The beginnings of e-learning tutorials, or computer-based-training as it was then known, saw text-based tutorials presented on mainframe computer terminals. With the introduction of the personal computer and the ability to display graphics, various procedural languages were used to develop tutorials. Such projects were laborious programming tasks which were extremely time consuming and expensive to develop.
Next came authoring languages such as Author from Microcraft and TenCore from Computer Teaching Corporation which simplified the programming task through the use of programming languages dedicated to the task of producing electronic tutorials. These languages still required a high level of expertise to use and the time requirement and expense was still prohibitive to many who would otherwise have taken advantage of the technology.
Finally, in order to address the issues of time, skill and budget, the current array of objects oriented authoring systems and WYSIWYG editors have largely replaced the authoring and procedural languages of the past. These systems use a variety of metaphors and strategies to create hypermedia presentations and e-learning tutorials.
Typically, hypermedia presentations are interactively designed and manually created with hypermedia authoring tools. Various commercial hypermedia authoring tools adopt different interactive authoring paradigms. The representative presentation authoring tools are summarized as follows.
PowerPoint from Microsoft is based on a structure-oriented model and supports hierarchical information content authoring in a 2D layout. Many commercial word processing tools follow this authoring model. Documents are often developed in terms of hierarchical structures such as book, pages or slides, sections, subsections, etc., and WYSWIG user interfaces are provided to support structure editing and issue formatting commands interactively.
Authorware from Macromedia and IconAuthor from AimTech are based on a flowchart model and use icons representing events such as audio or video, if-then functions, branching and hyperlinks in a linear progression like flowchart control. Content editors to assign real media files and properties to each icon could be used. This model provides high-level program control and global ordering of information presentation.
Director from Macromedia, based on a time-line model, displays media sequences as tracks and specializes in synchronizing events. It can be used to create high-level multimedia presentations.
Multimedia Toolbook from Asymetrix, based on an object-oriented model with scripting capability, provides more support of complex interaction behaviour. Users can interactively enter document content (in multimedia objects) and define object properties including various formatting commands and scripts for object behaviour. This authoring tool allows the user to get to a lower-level control of object and system behaviour with script commands.
Despite their promise of greater development speed, shorter learning curves and lower costs, today's authoring systems for e-learning tutorial and hypermedia presentation development are still too cumbersome, too time consuming and therefore too expensive for many potential businesses to use. Consequently, very few small to medium sized enterprises and educational institutions take advantage of e-learning strategies for training staff and students.
All of these systems require the user to determine the location and format of text on each screen. All of these systems require the user to develop or select appropriate graphics for inclusion on screens and then position them correctly. All of these systems require the user to manually create learning activities and all of these systems require extensive testing of the resulting courseware. In short, none of the current systems available, solve the problem of excessive development time, and therefore cost, of developing e-learning courseware and hypermedia presentations.